Iowa Report Reveals Navy's Hypocrisy

September 24, 1989|By DAVID EVANS

WASHINGTON — The magnitude of the terrific explosion inside the battleship Iowa's gun turret last April comes through the dry, bureaucratic language of Rear Adm. Richard Milligan's official report of investigation.

Subsequent to the blast, "organized working parties went through the turret to collect body parts."

Not whole bodies. Pieces. That's what happens when explosive shock waves bounce around inside confined spaces; they tear up equipment and bodies with merciless execution.

Although standard gunnery procedures were not being followed, the Navy's four-month investigation is likely to culminate in only the mildest disciplinary actions for the officers responsible for enforcing correct practices, while heaps of blame are dumped on Gunner's Mate 2nd Class Clayton Hartwig.

Milligan asserted that forensic evidence conclusively proved Hartwig was indeed standing at the breach of that mighty and dangerous 16-inch gun moments before the awful explosion.

This point is central to the investigation's ultimate conclusion: Hartwig did it. Milligan's investigation said overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to Hartwig as the only man who was in a position to place the home-made detonator that likely killed him and 46 of his shipmates.

To buy the conclusion we must accept a whole train of hypotheses.

This is not what Navy legal officers are taught. According to one graduate of the Navy's Judge Advocate General school, one important case study concerned that of a sailor accused of peeping through the window of a nurse's quarters. His identification card was found outside the window.

"The ID card suggests that Seaman Jones was there; it doesn't prove he looked through the window with lascivious intent," said my naval officer friend.

"You only get one bite out of the apple of hypothesis," he said.

Even if Hartwig was standing at the breech, to conclude he was suicidally motivated to cause the explosion is to take the prohibited second bite out of the apple of hypothesis.

This line of reasoning shifts attention from the overall laxity surrounding the firing procedures aboard the Iowa.

Milligan was laudably blunt. The procedures, he said, didn't cause the explosion, but "they cast the proper operation of gunnery systems in USS Iowa in a poor light and general doubt. Further, such ... substandard operations ... can serve as a foundation of disaster."

The shaky baseline he was talking about consisted, among other things, of the blatantly unauthorized use of five instead of six powder bags for the projectiles being fired. The firefighting system inside the turret wasn't charged with water before the firing exercise. The quality of the training received, said Milligan, "is suspect." Only 13 out of 51 personnel in the turret were properly qualified.

To be sure, commanding officer Capt. Fred Moosally was poorly served by subordinate officers who did not keep him informed of the training deficiencies or the appalling deviations from approved firing procedures.

Milligan said flatly the commanding officer and his grievously derelict lieutenants didn't have a "viable" gunnery training and safety program.

His recommendations sure read like a call for courts-martial of some officers, suggesting the Navy would do more than blame a dead seaman. But on the day the investigation was released, Milligan said what he had in mind for the officers concerned is non-judicial punishment. In the military justice system, that's the equivalent of traffic court.

The apparent rationale for this slap-on-the-wrist response is that Hartwig's purported detonator, not cavalier supervision and procedures, caused 47 deaths.

Turn the problem around. Suppose there had been no deaths. Just, say, a sailor's arm amputated by an improperly-closed breechblock. That would have been investigated, and all the attendant training and oversight shortcomings would have come out.

The Navy has fired skippers for less, like for denting their ship's bow on a coal barge.

Yet the senior admirals who reviewed Milligan's investigation said Moosally should not be detached "for cause," which is Navy-talk for firing.

Adm. Powell F. Carter Jr., commander in chief of the Navy's Atlantic Fleet, of which Iowa is a part, was one of the top guns who agreed Moosally should keep his ship, while declaring that "systems are not supposed to become empty rituals," and "accountability is the core value in the measurement of performance."